It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World

1963 US
Dir:Stanley Kramer
Stars:Spencer Tracy, Milton Berle, Sid Caesar,
Edie Adams

From Left:Edie Adams, Sid Caesar, Jonathan Winters, Ethel Merman
Milton Berle, Mickey Rooney, Buddy Hackett


This movie is one of few comedies made by rather no-nonesense director Stanley Kramer. Therefore, before I watched this film for the first time, I was thinking without any special reason that it had to be quite a highbrow comedy. But, it betrayed my expectation beautifully when I watched it. It's studded with definitely physical gags over three hours. In spite of or rather because of the fact that this movie is too long as a comedy, the plot development is very simple such as several groups of cockamamy characters are frenetically searching for the treasure about which a dying old man told them as was buried under the tree called "the Big W" and the question is centered upon who'll get it. Initially 4 groups are pursuing the treasure; Sid Caesar + Edie Adams, Milton Berle + Dorothy Provine + Ethel Merman, Mickey Rooney + Buddy Hackett and Jonathan Winters; and soon such ever more weird characters join them as Phil Silvers, Terry-Thomas, Dick Shawn and Peter Falk, and on top of which Spencer Tracy plays a police chief tracking down all those treasure seekers who will eventually turn out to be as phony and crooked a character as they are. Besides them, this movie embraces cameo appearances of such famous comedians as Buster Keaton, Jerry Lewis, Jack Benny, Carl Reiner and Don Knotts. But, apart from all of this, I think that the most significant role made by this movie to the movie history is that it spawned a series of movies whose plot lines are such that several groups of strange characters are racing for winning something riding on some sort of vehicles while interfering with each other in order to keep others from winning. For example, Ken Annakin's "Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines"(1965) and "Monte Carlo or Bust"(1969), Blake Edwards' "The Great Race"(1965), "Cannonball" series in the 70s and 80s, and recently "Rat Race"(2001). It seems to me that one of the difficulties of making this sort of movies is that main focus must be distributed among several parts, the parts each of which is played by one particular group of a bunch of weird characters, and, in spite of this, the overall plot development must also be tightly retained, and that without either of them the movie would surely become the one like Coca-Cola without soda. In the case of "It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World", as each part is played by competent comedy players, we can easily guess that the individual parts of this movie would be great. However, this fact alone might have backfired without the presence of Spencer Tracy, for, being parts played excellently by able comedy character players, there would have been a possibility that the integration of the movie itself might have come apart into all those individual parts especially considering the fact that this movie is tremendously long as just a comedy movie. In short, the part played by Spencer Tracy who is definitely a steady actor and isn't necessarily a genuine downright comedian is successfully binding together the individual parts played by colorful personalities of renowned comedians and comediennes. In a sense, this movie is of comedy virtuosity because nobody have ever tried to make such a comedy like this one that is filled with definitely physical gags over three hours and succeeded in avoiding winding up in just another example of total failure of a heavy-handed overlong movie. Additionally saying, the animation sequence shown in the title-back accompanied with Earnest Gold's music is quite funny and splendid. I miss this kind of title-back animation these days. Why don't they do it any more? I liked it definitely. Finally, I would like to add this; among all those famous comedians and comediennes, I liked Paul Ford the most who falls off from a control tower trying to make the plane safely land which is piloted by a none-pilot fool played by Buddy Hackett.


All articles are written by Kaminarikozou
E-mail:hj7h-tkhs@asahi-net.or.jp